On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 09:14:30PM -0800, Bob La Quey wrote: > So I am going to stand behind this statement: > Software development is simply the reduction of > ambiguity surrounding a problem to zero.
In that Sussman video he gives an interesting example of something that has been taught (and continues to be!) millions of times in calculus classes all over the world but is just plain wrong..... Ever heard of the chain rule? df/dx = (df/du) * (du/dx) . Technically this is not correct because f is either is function of x or u but not *both*. The reason this doesn't bother anyone is that students eventually (hopefully) learn to read what the *implied* rules are behind the *informal* mathematical notation. If calculus books were required to present mathermatical statements in Scheme or Python code that ran correctly, then they would be forced to make obvious all this implied information. Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
